Massagers are known, as for example from my earlier U.S. Pat. No. 3,499,439 as well as U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,931,849 and 2,867,211, cited therein, which have a housing adapted to be held in the hand and containing a motor and a transmission connected to vibratory massaging fingers extending from the housing. The transmission is normally relatively bulky, constituting a pinion that drives a plurality of planetary-type gears in turn meshing with a ring gear in turn carrying an eccentric pin that operates a crank. This crank in turn is connected to one of a plurality of intermeshing gears that themselves carry the inner ends of the vibratory fingers that extend through the lower side of the housing. Thus on rotation of the input pinion by the motor in the upper part of the housing the crank oscillates back and forth so as similarly to oscillate the massage fingers. These massage fingers are placed against the body portion of the person being massaged.
Such devices are typically rather hard to hold. As a rule they are made as small as possible at the upper motor part for grasping by the hand and they may even be provided with a laterally extending handle for best manipulation. Nonetheless the heavy lower part still is offcenter so that manipulation of the device is difficult.
A further difficulty of the known systems is that in an attempt to make them as compact as possible for easiest holding it is normally considered impossible to provide any type of cooling or ventilating system. Thus after some use the devices become rather hot and uncomfortable to hold.
The natural solution to both of these problems is to provide as small a motor as possible. This can be done by simply reducing the size and the power of the motor, thereby also reducing the effectiveness of the massage unit. It is also possible to provide a much higher quality and more compact motor, which nonetheless has the disadvantage of considerably raising the cost of the massager.